The CBI is the Central Bureau of Investigations for India and is one of the biggest crime investigation organization in the country. This hack is definitely a slap in the face for Indians. The Pakistan Cyber Army has left a message saying that this attack was a response to the “Indian Cyber Army”. It is a known fact that the Indian and Pakistani governments are at loggerheads, but this is taking the war to digital levels now.

The message left on the CBI site is as follows:

Oooopssss! WTF? CBI? Cyber Crime? Hacked? hahaha funny aint it! :P

This attempt is in response to the pakistani websites hacked by Indian Cyber Army’. We told you before too ..we are sleeping but not dead..remember PCA(pakistan cyber army)!..back off kids or we will smoke your d00rs off like we did before..lets see what you investigating agency so called CBI can do for you or for us! haha…one more attempt from your side..we got your every website lying around here like its our local server! buahahaha..so we would like to say to your 31337 hackers and your 31337 NIC team..go and read some more books ..you guys are seriously bunch of script_kiddies! ..you know nothing rite now..got r00t access to NTC server? wtf..mass defacements..how about something like this..a planned attack! haha..btw we got r00t to your NIC too :P ..your filtering sucks..have fun! and DO NOT DISTURB..we got better things to do.. :D ..stop complaining about pakistani websites security..secure your own ass first..thats what intelligent people do!..lol…tata :D

India took a big blow today as a group of hackers from Pakistan hacked into the official website of BSNL. BSNL is the largest telecom provider in India and this hack has been carried out by a group that likes to call itself the “Urdu Hackers”.

The attackers have claimed that they have been able to download private data from the website database as well. This has compromised BSNL users and has compromised the government as well as BSNL is also the government’s official telecom provider.

Poor, poor Microsoft. It seems that their line of Halo shooters is jinxed when it comes to pre-release piracy. Halo 2 was leaked, and so was Halo 3, with Microsoft issuing a 7,992 year ban on Xbox Live users who were caught playing the leaked version. Now, it’s Halo: Reach’s turn.

Though scheduled to be released on the 14th of September, this year, Halo: Reachwormed its way into the Xbox marketplace with a price-tag of a 9,999 Microsoft Points (or the princely sum of $1,250). Apparently this was the review distributable that could be unlocked by redeeming a special code in the marketplace.

As some of you guys know, Joakim posted a thread regarding ” I have reach ” and showed a few screenshots. The thread, words, and work is all true. The legend series of ‘Halo’ was ending with a bang, a bang of that will leave the re-playability high, keeping Firefight blazing. We now pronounce this to you. The team of Game-Tuts have acquired Reach. This isn’t just a bunch of files thrown together and slapped into the JTAG External Memory. Think of it this way, “Xport”, only if we can manage it correctly since a PIRS file of 6.87gb is a “god package” – quote from Cthulhu. We are still working on this and more information is to come. The only thing I can say is that retails might have the ability to play Reach on the files information. PIRS files are signed by Microsoft and given the ability to be played on a retail. The game “Halo : Reach”, as if all goes well, will be shown on a LIVE stream[Offline] via our channels, I believe we will have more than 1 stream. Expect a full blown amazement of a glorious game that we all have been waiting for in 2010.

Some people drop shortcuts and files all over their Windows Desktop. The result will be something between rigid organization and total chaos. There are a few people who can’t stand to see anything on their Desktop except the nice wallpapers they put there. Here are a few tips for these neat freaks.

A. Right Click Method — If you’ve been around Windows awhile, you probably already know this method. Right click anywhere on an empty area of your Desktop, and choose “Arrange Icons By“, then select “Show Desktop Icons“. Use this method to show or hide icons any time you wish. Just be aware that it takes Windows a seemingly long, 5 or 6 seconds to actually react to this choice. Why does it take so long? Ask Bill Gates.

If you don’t understand something in this section, I’ll remind you to read my post telling you how to use Regedit. Don’t mess with the Windows Registry unless you have a basic knowledge of how it all works.

C. Freeware app Desktop Control Center

— Ok, I’ll confess, I am one of those neat freaksat times and my Desktop has way too many icons on it. My favorite method for hiding them is a little utility created by Robert Hess, a Microsoft Software Designer.

Desktop Control Center (DCC) is one of those hard to findutilities, written way back in the early 1990’s. It’s tiny, at 19k, and it’s a stand-alone, single executable file.

I usually set a link to it in my Quick Launch as shown below. The second, green icon is Desktop Control Center.

Once launched, it’ll give you the option to hide all the icons, when you chose Hide the Desktop Window.

You can close the DCC app as soon as you’ve made a choice. It doesn’t need to continue running. The reason I always place it next to the blue Show Desktopshortcut, is that when you hit Show Desktop, all your application Windows will minimize just an you’d expect, however, all your hidden icons will temporarily show on the desktop for you as well. Now that’s a neat trick.

Oh, in case you want it, here’s the green desktop icon I made for the Quick Launch shortcut. I created it with IcoFX.

Twitter can be pretty overwhelming for somebody who is new to it. You hear your geeky friends doing all sorts of tricks, hacks and cool things on Twitter but you don’t know anything about it. Fear not, this post is supposed to answer all the questions you ever had about doing something on Twitter. In these, you can find really basic information about Twitter features and even advanced hacks and tricks for carrying out some unique Twitter tasks. Read on:

The website TCS.com which belongs to India’s largest software vendor, Tata Consultancy Services, was hacked today by a French hacker. This hack will definitely lead to total embarrassment for the software firm who thrives on creating software and security systems day in and day out.

If you visit TCS.com right now you will be greeted with a screen which looks similar to the screenshot below.

However, TCS is not the only high profile site to be hacked, in recent times the Orkut Brazil blog was hacked along with the high profile TechCrunch being hacked as well. Just goes on to show that hackers could easily get into your system if you do not use secured software.

As a word of advice, I would like to ask users to keep their web software up-to-date, no matter if it is a pain to do, because you could be the next in line to get hacked for using software which has vulnerabilities.

The Official Orkut Brazil blog was apparently hacked by someone with the hacker leaving some html pages which contained malware on the site. Orkut is one of the most popular social networking site in Brazil and India with millions of users using it every day.

According to Google Discovery (translated), some pages on the official Orkut Brazilian blog were displaying some weird content as seen in the screenshot below.

The layout of the page was not in line with other blog which you will see at http://blog.orkut.com and also displayed a hotmail ID instead of a Gmail ID. However, they also discovered a page on the blog which was hosting and distributing malware on the site.

The page was finally cleaned up around 2 hours after it was posted on Google Discovery and currently the URL http://blog.orkut.com.br/ throws a 404 error. Not much information is available right now and Google has not made it clear as to how the user was able to attack their servers or add malware pages to it. We will update this post when new information becomes available.

It looks the most popular Technology blog in the world TechCrunch just got hacked. Users visiting TechCrunch.com will be not be greeted with the usual dose of Technology, instead, you will see something which is similar to the screenshot below.

Though the reason for the hack is not yet clear, @parislemon aka MG Seigler just tweeted that the folks at TC are aware of the situation. I checked on the DNS records and there does not seem to be any hijacks there, however it does look like somehow the hacker was able to get into the TechCrunch servers.

We, will update this post when more information becomes available, however, knowing TechCrunch, expect some explosive articles coming out in a day or two explaining the hack. Just a warning: DO NOT Click on the link on the site.

Update 1: TechCrunch is back up now, however, there is no official note about it yet, expect some details to come forth soon.

Update 2: Looks like the went down again, some sort of a recurring hack attack underway.

Update 3: Looks like they are back again at 2:31AM ET / 11:30PM PT, hope back for good this time.

Update 4: 2:40AM ET, and there they go down again.

Update 5: Still down at 3AM ET, looks like they are internally moving servers/IP, the site now throws a 500 error, it should be back up in an hour or two.

Update 6: 4AM ET – TechCrunch has confirmed the exploit and are working on it, visitors should see a message as seen in the screenshot above.

Update 7: 5AM ET – TechCrunch is finally back up, and this time we think for good.

Update 8: 6:12AM ET TechCrunch came out with an update that the site was hacked, however they said it was redirected which was not the case, hopefully both TechCrunch and @rackspace should clarify more on this in the next few hours.

Ubuntu Tweaks has released the version 0.5.0 of the software. Ubuntu tweaks is a revolutionary software which takes customizing Ubuntu to totally new heights. This betters our experience of using Ubuntu. It has got many new features like syncing data from the web, a better UI and lots more. The new version supports only the latest full release of Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. Given that, it also supports other Ubuntu based distros like Linux Mint 8, but has no support for older versions of Ubuntu.

The version 0.5.0 has made many major changes like:

Dropped support for any Ubuntu version before 9.10

Used native system icons in UI

A redesigned sidebar and title bar

Improved third party source, with data sync enabled.

Improved update manager

A show desktop button

The new version of Ubuntu tweaks will also allow automatic updates of the software list and this will keep the software list up-to-date, always. Also, the add-remove software which has been replaced by the application center is much better in usability and updates the data from UTCOM, that is, the ubuntu-tweaks.com website.